Mind tricks: Six ways to explore your brain

How does your brain work? Brain imaging, transcranial magnetic stimulation, and
similar advanced techniques have given neuroscientists huge insights into this
question. Yet studying the brain doesn’t have to be such a high-tech enterprise.
Simple experiments can still probe the inner workings of the brain, and many of
these are easy to set up at home or are available on the internet.

Try them on yourself and you will experience first-hand some of its strangest, most
amazing workings – facets of brain function that scientists are only just starting to
understand. You’ll see aspects of perception, memory, attention, body image, the
unconscious mind – and the curious consequences of your brain being split in two.

Watch a video demonstrating the rubber hand illusion (see below)

1 Seeing isn't believing

TAKE a moment to observe the world around you. Scan the horizon with your
eyes. Tilt your head back and listen. You're probably getting the impression that
your senses are doing a fine job of capturing everything that is going on. Yet that
is all it is: an impression.

Despite the fact that your visual system seems to provide you with a continuous
widescreen movie, most of the time it is only gathering information from a tiny
patch of the visual field. The rest of the time it isn't even doing that. Somehow
from this sporadic input it conjures up a seamless visual experience.

What is going on? Bang in the middle of your retina is a small patch of densely
crowded photoreceptors called the fovea. This is the retina's sweet spot, the only
part of the eye capable of seeing with the rich detail and full colour we take for
granted. This tiny spot - which covers an area of our visual field no bigger than the
moon in the sky - feeds your visual system almost all of its raw information.

To build up a big picture, your eyes constantly dart about, fixating for a fraction of
a second and then moving on. These jerky movements between fixations are
called saccades, and we make about three per second, each lasting between 20
and 200 microseconds.

The curious thing about saccades is that while they are happening we are
effectively blind. The brain doesn't bother to process information picked up during
a saccade because the eyes move too rapidly to capture anything useful. All in all,
your visual system works like a man blundering around in the dark waving around
a flickering torch with a very narrow beam.

Despite the fact that you don't normally notice saccades, you can catch them in
action. Look at your eyes close-up in the mirror and flick your focus back and forth
from one pupil to another. However hard you try you cannot see your eyes move -
even though somebody watching you can. That's because the motion is a saccade,
and your brain isn't paying attention. Now pick two spots in the corners of your
visual field and flick your gaze from one to the other and back again. If you're
lucky you'll notice, just barely, a brief flash of darkness. This is your visual cortex
clocking off.

So how does your brain weave such fragmentary information into a seamless
movie? This remains something of a mystery. The best explanation, according to
Andrew Hollingworth of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, is that your short-term
and long-term visual memories retain information from previous fixations and
integrate them into a here-and-now visual experience (Visual Cognition, vol 14, p
781).

There is also some guesswork going on. You can get a feel for this from the frozen-
time illusion - the sensation that you sometimes get when you look at a clock and
the second hand appears to freeze momentarily before tick-tocking back into
action.

This happens because of saccades. To compensate for the temporary shut-down of

vision, your brain makes a guess at what it would have seen, but it does so
retrospectively. So the 100 or so milliseconds of blindness gets back-filled with the
image that appears after the saccade is over. If your eyes happen to alight on the
clock just after the second hand has moved, your brain assumes that the hand was
in that location for the duration of the saccade too. The "second" then lasts about
10 per cent longer than normal, which is enough for you to notice.

The weirdness isn't confined to vision. Your auditory system is also full of gaps and
glitches that the brain cleans up so we can make sense of the world. This is
especially true of speech.

In everyday life we encounter lots of situations that obscure or distort people's

voices, yet most of the time we understand effortlessly. This is because our brain
pastes in the missing sounds, a phenomenon called phonemic restoration. It is so
effective that it is sometimes hard to tell that the missing sounds are not there.

A good demonstration of this effect was published last year by Makio Kashino of
NTT Communication Science Laboratories in Atsugi, Japan. He recorded a voice
saying "Do you understand what I'm trying to say?" then removed short chunks
and replaced them with silence. This made the sentence virtually unintelligible. But
when he filled the gaps with loud white noise, the sentence miraculously becomes
understandable (Acoustic Science and Technology, vol 27, p 318).

"The sounds we hear are not copies of physical sounds," Kashino says. "The brain
fills in the gaps, based on the information in the remaining speech signal." The
effect is so powerful that you can even record a sentence, chop it into 50-
millisecond slices, reverse every single slice and play it back - and it is perfectly
intelligible. You can listen to Kashino's sound files at
http://asj.gr.jp/2006/data/kashi/index.html.
Another demonstration of the brain's ability to extract meaning from distorted
signals is a form of synthesised speech called sine-wave speech. When you first
hear a sentence in sine-wave speech it sounds alien and unintelligible, somewhat
reminiscent of whistling or birdsong. But if you listen to the same sentence in
normal speech and then return to the sine-wave version, it suddenly snaps into
auditory focus. Try as you might, you cannot "unhear" the words that you didn't
even realise were words the first time you heard them (listen to demos at
www.mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk/~mattd/sine-wave-speech and
www.lifesci.sussex.ac.uk/home/Chris_Darwin/SWS).

According to Matt Davis of the UK Medical Research Council's Cognition and Brain
Sciences Unit in Cambridge, this happens because the brain has circuits that
respond to speech, but doesn't switch them on unless it detects spoken language
(Hearing Research, vol 229, p 132). Sine-wave speech isn't speech-like enough to
trigger the circuits, but once you know it is speech they spring into action. "It's an
example of top-down influence," says Davis. "What you know about what you're
hearing changes the way you hear it."

Given the tricks that your visual and auditory systems play, it probably comes as
no surprise that when they get together, fights can break out. A good
demonstration of this is the McGurk effect, in which listening to a series of identical
syllables such as "ba ba ba ba" while watching somebody mouth "ba da la va"
makes you hear "ba da la va". Try it for yourself at
www.faculty.ucr.edu/~rosenblu/lab-index.html.

Until recently, psychologists believed that the visual system always trumps the
other senses, but in 2000 a team of psychologists at the California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena proved that this isn't the case. They showed volunteers a
single flash on a computer screen. If they accompanied the flash with two very
short beeps, the volunteers saw two flashes - in other words, this time the
auditory system wins (Nature, vol 408, p 788). See the illusion at
www.cns.atr.jp/~kmtn/soundInducedIllusoryFlash2/index.html.

2 This is not my nose

YOU may know the crossed-hands illusion. Hold your arms out in front of you and
cross them over, rotate your hands so your palms face each other, then mesh your
fingers together. Now slowly rotate your hands up between your arms so you're
staring at your knuckles. Ask someone to point to one of your index fingers, then
attempt to move it. Did you move the wrong one?

If so, you've just experienced a minor failure of your body schema - your mental
representation of the location, position and boundaries of your body. Your brain
builds this up by drawing on data from vision, touch and a body-wide network of
proprioceptive sensors that monitor position. Your body schema is a critical part of
self-awareness, which is why it feels so odd when it goes wrong.
In the crossed-hands illusion, the schema fails because of a confusing visual input.
You don't normally see your hands in this convoluted position; the finger you move
is the one that is pointing in the direction that the correct one would be pointing if
you had simply clasped your hands as if in prayer.

An even odder way of disturbing your body schema is an illusion that taps straight
into your sense of body ownership. Known as the rubber-hand illusion, it fools you
into thinking a rubber hand - or even a piece of wood, or a table - is part of your
body.

To experience the illusion, get hold of a model hand (it doesn't have to be very
realistic) and put it on the table in front of you. If it is a left hand, put your actual
left hand somewhere you can't see it, in the same pose as the rubber hand. Now
get someone to touch and stroke your unseen hand and the rubber hand with
identical movements. If you concentrate on the rubber hand, you will probably get
the uncanny feeling that it is your own. (See a video of the rubber hand illusion
here)

What this illusion shows is that your sense of body ownership is less anchored in
reality than you think. Your brain will happily override information from
proprioception to conjure up an incorrect yet coherent body schema based on
vision and touch.

In fact, your mental body map is an absolute sucker for visual information. This
year Frank Durgin of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania set up the illusion as
described above but instead of touching the rubber hand he merely "stroked" it
with light from a laser pointer, leaving the unseen hand alone. Two-thirds of 220
subjects reported a sense of ownership of the rubber hand and said they had the
sensation of heat and even touch from the laser pointer (Psychological Science, vol
18, p 152). "It's obvious the hand is rubber - no one is fooled at all," says Durgin.
"But if your brain decides it's your hand, all the conscious awareness in the world
won't change it."

If you can't get hold of a fake hand, there are other (though less reliable) ways to
experience the illusion. Some people can be fooled into believing a piece of wood
has replaced their hand. Around half of people can even be made to feel a table
top is part of their body. Sit at a table and put your hand out of sight underneath.
Get someone to tap and stroke this hand while doing exactly the same to the table
top directly above. If you watch the table top, you may experience the illusion that
the table has become part of your body.

Proprioception may be the junior partner to vision and touch in creating your body
schema, but it still plays a key role. You can demonstrate this with an illusion that
taps into proprioception alone. This Pinocchio illusion is hard to do without a
specialist piece of equipment called a physiotherapy vibrator, but if you can get
hold of one, try this. Close your eyes, touch the tip of your nose and then get
somebody to apply the vibrator at about 100 hertz to skin at the very top of your
bicep. This creates the strong sensation that you are straightening your elbow, and
that your nose is simultaneously growing longer and longer, like Pinocchio's.

Vibrating the skin above a tendon excites stretch receptors in the muscle, creating
a powerful sensation that the muscle is stretching and the joint is extending. This
confuses your proprioceptors, which revise your body schema accordingly. The
result is rather like having a phantom limb: the sensed position of your arm in
space doesn't correspond to its actual position.

If you're touching your nose at the same time, this leads to a weird sensation that
it is growing. Your brain integrates the touch sensation from your fingers with the
"movement" of your arm and comes to the erroneous conclusion that your nose
must be growing to fill the gap.

The Pinocchio illusion is an important tool for understanding how the brain
calculates the size and shape of our bodies. This isn't just an academic question.
When it goes wrong, such as in body dysmorphic disorder, anorexia and phantom
limb, the results can be devastating (PLoS Biology, vol 3, p e412).

3 A brain of two halves

WOULD you consider yourself to be logical and analytical or creative and

empathic? According to popular psychology you're one or the other, and it's all
down to which half of your brain you use the most: the rational and calculating left
or the intuitive, artistic right.

It's a myth, of course, but like all good ones it contains a grain of truth. Your
cerebral cortex - the outer layer of your brain that deals with higher functions - is
indeed split into two halves. They are connected by a flat bundle of nerve fibres
called the corpus callosum, but work in subtly different ways - and these
differences occasionally flicker into your conscious awareness.

The left-brain/right-brain myth arose from experiments done in the early 1970s on
people who had had their corpus callosum cut as a last-ditch treatment for
epilepsy. These "split-brain" patients showed some strikingly odd responses to
information that was preferentially sent to one side of the brain or the other by
presenting it to the extreme left or right of their visual field. This works because
the right visual field is monitored by the right eye, which routes straight into the
left brain, and vice versa.

For example, when a word or picture is presented to their right brain, split-brain
patients are often unable to read or recognise it. This and similar experiments led
to the idea that the left side of the brain deals with logic and facts while the right
side is more intuitive and interpretive. We now know that this dichotomy is too
simplistic, but its essence holds true. The latest view is that the two hemispheres
have subtly different styles of information processing: the left has a bias towards
detail, the right a more holistic outlook. You can watch a video of a split-brain
experiment at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZMLzP1VCANo&mode=related&search=.

Most people, of course, have a functional corpus callosum that shunts information
between the hemispheres. Even so, subtle left-right differences exist. One task
where the hemispheres operate differently is face recognition. When most of us
see a face, our right cerebral hemisphere does the lion's share of the work
recognising its gender and decoding its expression. And because the right
hemisphere is fed by the left visual field, that means we have a notable left-sided
bias in our judgement of faces.

Look at this pair of faces (left). Which appears happier? Chances are you chose the
bottom one. The two faces are, however, identical apart from being mirror images
of one another. The picture is called a chimeric face and is made by taking two
pictures of the same face, one with a neutral expression and the other smiling,
chopping the pictures in half and joining the two mismatched pieces. Our general
bias towards the left side of the face (as we look at it) makes us see the faces as
different even though they are essentially equivalent.

It isn't just visual processing that is lateralised. There is some evidence that
emotion is too, with the right side of the brain more specialised for negative
emotions and the left for positive ones. Amazingly, simply activating one or other
hemisphere by moving parts of your body can noticeably change your emotional
state.

You can experience this by repeating an experiment first done in 1989 by Bernard
Schiff and Mary Lamon of the University of Toronto in Canada (Neuropsychologia,
vol 27, p 923). They asked 12 volunteers to perform a "half smile", lifting one
corner of their mouths and holding it for a minute. Left-smilers reported feeling
sadder afterwards, while right-smilers felt more positive.

Other researchers have reproduced the effect simply by getting people to contract
the muscles of their left or right hand a few times. More recent research has
suggested that motivation is similarly affected: people who performed right-sided
muscle contractions became more assertive and spent longer trying to crack an
impossible maths puzzle.

Unsurprisingly, these claims are controversial, with some teams failing to replicate
the results. Last year, however, Eddie Harmon-Jones of Texas A&M University in
College Station used EEG to confirm that flexing the hand muscles produces
changes in emotion, but only when it is preceded by activation of the opposite
cortex (Psychophysiology, vol 43, p 598). The left-brain/right-brain legend, it
appears, is alive and well.

4 Probe your subconscious

IT WAS a ground-breaking investigation into the nature of consciousness and free

will. In 1983, psychologist Benjamin Libet of the University of California, San
Francisco, hooked five volunteers up to an EEG machine and asked them to make
voluntary movements, such as lifting a finger, whenever they felt like it. Watching
the electrical activity in their brains, he discovered that his subjects only became
consciously aware of their intention to act a few hundred milliseconds after their
brain had initiated the movement. Libet was forced to conclude that what feels like
a conscious decision may in fact be nothing of the sort (Brain, vol 106, p 623).

This experiment was the first demonstration of what is now an established theory
in neuroscience: a major proportion of your thoughts and actions - even things
you believe you are in conscious control of - actually take place in your
unconscious. Most of the time you are essentially flying on autopilot.

Libet's experiment involved equipment that you're unlikely to have at home, but
you can tap into a similar phenomenon using what is known as the "ideomotor
effect". Make a pendulum out of a paper clip and a piece of thread and dangle it
over a cross drawn on a piece of paper. Ask yourself a simple yes/no question,
such as "am I at home?" or "do I have a cat?", and tell yourself that if the
pendulum swings clockwise, the answer is yes, while anticlockwise means no.
Spookily, the pendulum will generally start rotating in the direction of the correct
answer.

It looks supernatural, but it's not. The reason it works is that, as soon as you ask
the question, your unconscious brain fires up motor preparation circuits in
anticipation of the answer it expects to see. These circuits initiate subtle muscle
movements that you are not normally aware of - except when they are amplified
by a pendulum (or dowsing stick or Ouija board). This is your unconscious brain in
action.

A different aspect of your mental underworld is reflected in your "implicit

assumptions". Your subconscious mind isn't just planning and executing actions, it
also spends a great deal of time analysing the world, looking for patterns and
relationships that can help you navigate through life. The conclusions it comes to
are called implicit assumptions - subtle prejudices about people and events. For
example, if you hear on the radio that a teenage boy has been shot dead in a car
park near his home, it's almost impossible not to make assumptions about his
family background and the area where he lived.

"Everybody has implicit assumptions," says Brian Nosek, a psychologist at the

University of Virginia in Charlottesville who played a big part in their discovery.
"They're a necessary part of how the brain operates and they generally serve us
very well."

But not always. Nosek and colleagues argue that because we are not in control of
our implicit assumptions, and are seldom aware of them, it is possible to develop
unconscious prejudices that your conscious mind would find unappealing or even
abhorrent - such as associating men with science and women with the arts,
preferring thin people to fat people or assuming that blonde women are stupid.
"You may think you're egalitarian, yet your associations are often quite different,"
says Nosek.

Nosek and colleagues have devised a way to access these implicit assumptions
(take the test at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit). The tests are based on the
idea that people find it easier to recognise pairs of stimuli that fit their unconscious
assumptions - white people and positive words or black people and negative
words, for example. People often find the results of their tests "provocative", says
Nosek. "The most common implicit associations are race and age - they're quite
profound."

Maybe sometimes it is better to ignore your unconscious mind.

5 Pay attention!

IMAGINE you are walking down the street and a passer-by asks you for directions.
As you talk to him, two workmen rudely barge between you carrying a door. Then
something weird happens: in the brief moment that the passer-by is behind the
door, he switches places with one of the workmen. You are left giving directions to
a different person who is taller, wearing different clothes and has a different voice.
Do you think you would notice?

Of course you would, right? Wrong. When researchers at Harvard University played
this trick on 15 unsuspecting people, eight of them failed to spot the change.

What this demonstrates is a phenomenon called "change blindness". It happens

because of a chronic shortage of a crucial mental resource: attention. You are
blithely unaware of most of what is going on around you, to the point where you
can fail to notice "obvious" changes in your surroundings.

Attention is not well understood, but whatever it is, we have a limited amount. Of
all the information entering or being generated by your brain at any one time -
sights, sounds, memories, ideas and so on - only a tiny fraction enters your
consciousness. Object-tracking studies suggest that the maximum number of
items we can attend to at any one time is around five or six (see demos at
http://ruccs.rutgers.edu/finstlab/demos.htm).

Scientists studying attention spend a lot of time playing with change blindness
because it provides direct access to the attentional system. In the door
experiment, the subjects fail to see the change because their attention is
elsewhere and the door conceals what would otherwise be attention-grabbing
motion.

You can experience the same thing by watching "flicker images". These consist of
two consecutive images that differ only in one key feature - two cowboys who
swap heads, say. If the images are flashed up in quick succession with a brief
blank screen between them (which acts like the door), most people take an
astonishingly long time to spot the difference (see demos at
www.psych.ubc.ca/~rensink/flicker/download, or try flicking your attention
between the two images in the diagram below).

Similarly, we often fail to notice blatant continuity errors when films cut from one
scene to another. We also usually fail to detect gradual changes to a static scene,
such as the addition of a large building (see demos at
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/djs_lab/demos.html and http://nivea.psycho.univ-
paris5.fr/Slow%20changes%20bis/intro.html).

"Basically, the explanation is that attention is needed to see change," says

psychologist Ronald Rensink of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver,
Canada. "Attention is drawn automatically to the motion signals that accompany a
change. But if these are swamped, then the observer can't rely on automatic
control, but needs to hunt around with their attention."

A similar phenomenon is motion-induced blindness, in which concentrating on a

moving pattern causes what should be very prominent static objects - such as
bright yellow dots - to disappear (see demos at
http://pantheon.yale.edu/%7Ebs265/demos/MIB-percScotoma.html). Motion-
induced blindness was only discovered in 2001 and it is still unclear why it
happens, but most researchers think it has something to do with attentional
resources.

There is a related and even more counter-intuitive demonstration of our limited

capacity for attention. If you are deliberately concentrating on something, it can
render you oblivious to other events that you would normally have no trouble
noticing. This "inattention blindness" is probably the reason why motorists
sometimes collide with objects such as pedestrians and buses that they simply
"didn't see".

The most famous demonstration of inattention blindness was staged in 1999 by

Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris of the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. It involves a game of basketball. Chances are you've seen it or read
about it before. If not, have a look at
http://viscog.beckman.uiuc.edu/grafs/demos/15.html. The task is to count the
number of passes made by the team in white. You won't believe your brain.

6 Made-up m emories

A FEW years ago, the actor Alan Alda visited a group of memory researchers at the
University of California, Irvine, for a TV show he was making. During a picnic
lunch, one of the scientists offered Alda a hard-boiled egg. He turned it down,
explaining that as a child he had made himself sick eating too many eggs.

In fact, this had never happened, yet Alda believed it was real. How so? The egg
incident was a false memory planted by one of UC Irvine's researchers, Elizabeth
Loftus.
Before the visit, Loftus had sent Alda a questionnaire about his food preferences
and personality. She later told him that a computer analysis of his answers had
revealed some facts about his childhood, including that he once made himself sick
eating too many eggs. There was no such analysis but it was enough to convince
Alda.

Your memory may feel like a reliable record of the past, but it is not. Loftus has
spent the past 30 years studying the ease with which we can form "memories" of
nonexistent events. She has convinced countless people that they have seen or
done things when they haven't - even quite extreme events such as being
attacked by animals or almost drowning. Her work has revealed much about how
our brains form and retain memories.

While we wouldn't want to plant a memory of a nonexistent childhood trauma in

your own brain, there is a less dramatic demonstration of how easy it is to form a
false memory called the Deese-Roediger-McDermott paradigm. Read the first two
lists of words and pause for a few minutes. Then read list 3 and put a tick against
the words that were in the first two. Now go back and check your answers...

“List 1
apple, vegetable, orange, kiwi, citrus, ripe, pear, banana, berry, cherry, basket,
juice, salad, bowl, cocktail”
“List 2
web, insect, bug, fright, fly, arachnid, crawl, tarantula, poison, bite, creepy,
animal, ugly, feelers, small
(Now wait a few minutes)”
“List 3
happy, woman, winter, circus, spider, feather, citrus, ugly, robber, piano, goat,
ground, cherry, bitter, insect, fruit, suburb, kiwi, quick, mouse, pile, fish”

Rubber hand' illusion creates ghost sensations

IF YOU and several other people have your arms resting on a table, how do you know which one is
yours? It seems that when more than one sensory signal tells the same story, your brain believes it, even
if the hand it thinks is yours is a rubber dummy.

This explanation for the so-called "rubber hand illusion" was suggested last year, but sceptics argued that
the illusion depends solely on sight. Now the research team that published the original study has shown
that people are deceived even when blindfolded.

Last year, Henrik Ehrsson at the Institute of Neurology in London and his colleagues asked volunteers to
place one hand under a table while a rubber one was placed in view. Then researchers used two
paintbrushes to simultaneously stroke the rubber hand, which subjects could see, and their hidden hand,
which they could feel. Within about 10 seconds, everyone was under the strange illusion that the rubber
arm was actually their own.
As the illusion set in, activity intensified in the brain's premotor cortex, a region known to process
multisensory inputs. Ehrsson and his colleagues suggested that we consider a body part to be our own
when multiple sensory signals - from sight and touch, for instance - are put together (Science, vol 305, p
875).

“When more than one sense tells you the same story your brain believes it. Even if the hand it thinks is
yours is a dummy”

But critics suggested that knowing your own body part does not involve several senses and that the
experiment instead showed how vision can override other senses. So Ehrsson's group has now set up a
new experiment with blindfolded volunteers. Researchers placed a volunteer's real index finger against a
rubber knuckle while they simultaneously touched the real knuckle on the other hand. Once again,
within seconds, volunteers were convinced they were touching their own hand. In fact, when asked to
point to their other hand, they pointed at the fake. "The brain compares two sensory signals to figure out
this is me or not me," says Ehrsson.

From issue 2505 of New Scientist magazine, 25 June 2005, page 10